Project Server 2007: Actual work in My Tasks changes after adding non-work time in My Timesheet

*** Update 3/19/2010 *** Thanks for the reminder TAE. We actually resolved this with a fix rather than accepting it was ‘by design. It is in the latest CU (Feb 2010) but I think came out last year in Oct or Dec CU originally ***

This is an issue you may come across depending on your specific workflow for time reporting and statusing. The scenario is that you enter time for a project task through My Tasks and save, and then in My Timesheet you add some time to a non-work category of Administrative time such as Sick – or any non-work item – for the same day. The issue shows up instantly if the category does not need approval and results in a change to the actual work value entered. There will be a KB article coming shortly and I’ll update this posting once it is available.

The reason this happens is that the non-working time entered in the timesheet is entered into the resources calendar as a calendar exception – making them unavailable for work for a period of the day, resulting in a change in the entered actual work for the same day. If the admin time is entered first, or the timesheet data is imported into my tasks then this behavior can be avoided. The problem is that the data goes in just for the day and not in a specific time-span, meaning you may get an overlap of your time entered and your non-working time – even if the total is still within the number of hours you normally work. You can also see this in Project Professional if you add a calendar exception where there is already actual work entered, but in Pro it is a little more obvious what is going on and easier to correct.

Sorry if this unusual behavior causes you some issues – but hopefully the workarounds and understanding of why it does what it does will make things easier for you.

Some aspects of the behavior you describe have been addressed, but the precise behavior will depend on the exact entries made, and the calendars in use – but basically the current scenario is as described.

This specific issue is not fixed and not being considered for a fix currently. I know there is some effort to change this behavior in the next release (currently it isn’t fixed) – so who knows, the same change – if succesful – may be able to be ported back to 2007.

Is this considered a bug at this time or are we now forcing everyone to use the Timesheet entry method? It is really not practical for most implementations and organizations, and we are finding the workaround to be a very difficult ‘sell.’ Any insight that you have would be greatly appreciated!

This characteristic is infuriating. I am managing a complex Project and just entering 1 day’s non-working time messes up the actual work done throughout the project. It results in several weeks’ work having to be corrected manually.

Thanks for the feedback. Based on this and feedback from other customers we are reviewing how we can make this behave better – but nothing coming out to resolve this just yet. Another option if this is very painful is to make your non-working categories into working time – which will then not create calendar exceptions. I appreciate this isn’t ideal and as soon as we have more news I will be sharing it.

I am currently facing a problem with my Time Sheet Project Server 2007, the problem is as follows, After creating some projects. some of them tend to appear in My Time Sheet and don’t appear in My task page, the second issue, is that After some resources fill in Time Sheet hours, and i approve them, they appear in some days, and don’t in others. Is this a bug or what?

We having an issue where the timesheet data in reporting are out of sync with the data in published.

So we are basically looking for at method to synchronize TS data between Published and RDB as you likewise can rebuild som data in RDB by restoring Archived Custom fields or by republish projects.

We have tried manually deleting timesheet data from RDB. This approach however requires the ts owner to republish his timesheet in order to repopulate RDB and there seems to be no way to take ownership of a TS by PSI.

Hi TAE, thanks for the reminder. We ended up looking at a fix for this rather than just saying it was ‘by design’. This is certainly in the latest CU (Feb 2010) and I think came out possible in October? Sorry for the confusion – i will add an update to the main article.